How to Make the Shift from Agent to Owner

Do you feel like you're super busy and at the same time you're not getting anywhere? I have been there. I have felt that feeling where I'm working so freaking hard. Yet am I getting closer to like meaningful goals in the areas of my life that matter most to me? So when I came up in the real estate industry, this is as a solo agent and a small team. And now it's sort of a hands off business. There were days where I worked every bit of 10 to 12 hours as a real estate agent. So I was just doing the job of real estate agent. I wasn't feeling like I was making progress toward building a business. I finally had this moment in time. And I'll get into the reason why I made the shift. I made this shift in my thinking that I had to spend time working in the business and then time working on the business. And this is something I picked up from the book E Myth Revisited by Michael Gerber. It doesn't tell you how you go about building a real real estate business or the tools or systems to use or the concept of like how to, you know, implement systems and how to take yourself out of different jobs. It did shift my mind around what's possible if you start spending time outside of the technical work of the business. So in real estate, the technical work of a real estate agent is working with buyers and sellers, generating leads, having conversations with prospects, buyer and seller prospects, and then working with, sitting down, having a consultation, getting them to agree to do business with you, doing a great job and getting to closing and this virtuous cycle of providing a level of experience that is referable so you'll get referrals and the cycle starts all over again. And when I made this shift in my, in my mind, in my thinking that I have to have to spend time doing the things in the business that aren't really. They don't feel like they're moving you forward when you're doing them. Yet when you look back at the progress you're making, it's the systems that you've installed that are providing a foundation for not having to do those things in the future. So the shift for me, the dramatic story for me was I was a new dad in November 2007. That was, I guess I was eight months into being a real estate agent at that point. I left a cozy corporate, I say cozy corporate job. The reality of my corporate job was that I was traveling every week in a single year. I traveled 250,000 miles in the air. I visited like 25 different countries. So it wasn't a life of freedom. And it was cozy in the sense that I didn't have a lot of pressure to perform. You know, my boss was just a super laid back guy. He allowed me to arrange my own travel and visit companies. I was in acquisitions and strategy. So it's a pretty cool, pretty cool gig. Wasn't going to give me any of the freedoms I wanted around time or money and any of that. And so when I got into real estate, I was instantly a top producer. I was instantly working, I like to say, six days a week. It was essentially seven days a week. When you're busy agent, you are working all the time. It's just the way that it is. And you know that. My first full year in real estate, My son turned 1 and I sold 44 homes that year. With an administrator hired first as a part time administrator. She lasted two weeks part time. I hired her for $14 an hour, 20 hours a week. She said, you have to pay me 20 and I'm going to go full time. Tia Wilson is her name. And she stayed with me for I think just over seven, maybe close to eight years. And you know, once I had that person in place that could give me leverage around the administrative tasks that are involved in being a real estate agent. And a real estate agent has to be a marketing coordinator, they have to be a listing coordinator coordinator, they have to be a closing coordinator, they have to be an office coordinator, they have to be a field coordinator or a runner. They have to be like, think of all the jobs that a real estate agent has to do without any leverage in the form of a person. They're doing all those things themselves. So once I got that piece in place, anders was turning one. We were trying to have a second child, had a couple miscarriages. Fast forward to April 2010. We had Kendall. So two kids at that time. And so I guess Julie got pregnant in. I'm just doing the math here, nine months off of. So about July 2009, the year I hired my first buyer agent, late in 2009, was where, just before that, things, things switched in my mind forever. I was working. If there was eight days a week, I was working eight days a week. It felt like eight days a week. And I was doing the. In the business and on the business. The on the business stuff is building the systems that allow for leveraged growth. And when I say leverage growth, it's growth in a way that doesn't involve you putting more hours into the business. And so when I realized that there was more to life than real estate or being a top producing real estate agent was going to consume me. Then it was this shift from agent to owner. And that was the focus that, that I took on. It didn't mean that I relinquished any responsibilities being a real estate agent. In fact, I was still the top producing agent in, on my team in 2010. That's the year we did 118 transactions. I did about half of them and I had about three or four agents on my team in 2010. Yeah, 2010, 2011 we did 178. I did about a third of the transactions and then 2012 I only did one transaction. We did 248. So it was in that early, probably in 2011 I was shifting. I hired a couple listing agents, hired a couple more buyer agents to backfill, you know, so we had a solid sales team. All the processes had built, have been built up. And they had been built up as my second job. My first job was being a busy agent and sort of coaching some of my agents and just running and gunning in the, you know, this. I do it, we do it, they do it, we, we were in the we do it. Every bit of I was doing production, they were doing production. We were just doing our best to get by together. And the systems allowed me to shift from we do it to they do it. And so the year we did 248 transactions, I was able to go down to one single transaction. And I had built the business on systems that provided so much value to the agents and the team members that came into my world that I didn't have to pay sort of unbalanced commission splits. And so I called them back in those days, value based commission splits where overall we pay out about a third of our commission checks. And that's without the team owner being in production. So it allows for a pretty balanced model. About a third goes to your broker and your agents, all of your agents, inside agents, outside agents, showing agents, all of that. A third goes to expenses which are marketing and administrative support and overhead. And then a third is yours to split with the government and that's with no team owner production. The team owner wants to do production. 50 to 60% margin are possible with the team owner working 40 to 45 hours a week in our model, in the real estate B school model that we teach. And so the shift was me, for me was I cannot be a great dad if I'm going to be a top real estate agent. So it wasn't an option, it wasn't sustainable. It was more important to me to be a great dad and to be a great husband than it was to be a great or a top producing real estate agent. So I was forced to build a business in real estate, a business that didn't depend on me. And so in 2013 I was able to go down from at that point five days a week. I went to three, two and one pretty rapidly as I delegated and elevated different roles and outcomes to team members that year. And then I was able to launch real estate B School in 2013. And you know, the story goes on from there. And here's the moral of the story and the thing I want to get, get over, get across this if you're listening or if you're watching. It's the fact that the systems, when we work on our business, it doesn't feel the same as when we're closing a deal. When we're closing a deal, it's mostly instant gratification. You're getting someone under contract or you're negotiating a repair, you're moving closer to a paycheck and then you sort of repeat that cycle. It's very satisfying. It's like dopamine release after, like if you're in that world and you're sort of just constantly in the transaction treadmill and just, you know, over and over again just addicted to the deal, those are the things that they're gonna get you paid, but not in the long term. And if so if you're not setting up a database marketing system or a client care system, you know, that doesn't depend on you or even lead gen systems and buyer marketing and listing market that don't depend on you. And you're not, you're not paying some exorbitant fee to another person to generate the lead. You have to spend time working on their systems so that you have the option to grow through leverage if you choose to do it. And it's. If you've ever heard me talk about the Eisenhower matrix, Dwight Eisenhower has this really awesome quote and I'm basically addicted to it at this point. Because I see right now in the market, we're in a busy market right now. Like with just the way this, you know, right now the pandemic is still COVID 19 is still a thing. You may be watching this when it's not a thing. Shifts happen all the time. Crazy markets happen all the time. And a crazy market is that you can only focus on the deal that's in front of you. Like that's the extent of your planning. You're planning like, how do I get through this deal? Like, that's the, it's so near term. When you think about building a true business, this is the quote I want you to remember. It's from a quote attributed to Dwight D. Eisenhower. He says, I have two kinds of problems, the urgent and the important. The urgent are not important and the important are never urgent. And so when you think about like the thing that feels like you got to take care of it right now, it's maybe something attached to a deal or you know, it's the thing right in front of you, it's rarely, rarely that is that like super important. When you think about the long game in business, like, if I were going to just commit to becoming a business owner versus being a real estate agent, the long game would tell me that I have to time block, you know, X hours per week to build systems that will run the business foundationally so I don't have to show up every day. And even if you want to do production, it's not, I'm not critiquing you and your desire to be working with buyers and sellers. The challenge with that model is that it typically ends pretty badly for the, for the agent that chooses that path. They're in their 60s and they're a real estate agent. They have not planned. There is no financial, you know, windfall that came from being a real estate agent. And they're just grinding transactions and they've never made the shift to business ownership. And so that is the thing I'm guarding against in this talk is that we have to make time for the things that are not urgent and critically important. And only when I think about like the shift to business ownership. So if you have an eye toward business ownership and you want to play a different game in real estate, the critically important that I'm talking about here is working on systems. And in your business, so specific to real estate B school, there are four drivers that we talk about. Attract, convert, deliver and scale. Each of those drivers have accelerators associated with them. And so I'll give you an example. Attract is database marketing, listing marketing and buyer marketing. You being the marketer, you generating low cost, high quality buyer and seller leads from your database or your listing marketing efforts or your buyer marketing efforts. When it comes to convert, it's your lead management system first and foremost, then your appointment setting process, then your consultation frameworks so that you don't have to do all of those things all the time. There's systems around it there's sales systems around those things. Same thing with deliver, right? What's your client management system look like? What does your critical technologies look like? What does your closing coordination processes look like? Can you deliver on the promises you made in sales to in delivery but not have to do all those things on your own? And then we talk about scale, where it's planning and knowing your numbers and growing your team, the culture, the cadence, all of that good stuff, the tracking, right? So if you're not paying attention to all of those things in your business, you will constantly be in the tyranny of the urgent, as Dwight D. Eisenhower called it. The urgent are not important. Yes, the deal is important, right? So yes, it's important that you give an experience to your client that gets them the thing that they want into a house they're buying or it gets them out of the house that they're selling. Right? You need to do that. But in the spectrum of business ownership and playing a different game, that thing is actually not that important. So when I was in production, I was doing those things. They weren't the focus like where I was obsessing, I was obsessing around building a system so that I can get out of doing that thing. And the service we provide buyers and sellers today, me being seven years in a row at one day a week, the service we provide today is world class. There isn't an agent in our market that can provide a better service than we do as a coordinated, high functioning, high performing real estate team. And so if you're not playing that game or going moving closer toward like the delivering an experience that they can't get anywhere else in any other agent in any other market in the country and also any other industry that they buy services or goods in. Right. We're competing with every company out there because they're getting great experiences with some companies in different industries. And when they come to talk to their real estate agent, are you at the same level as a Disney a Nordstrom? Right. Think of all the like world class businesses that we're competing with and consumer preferences are changing rapidly. That is for another week, my friends. So hopefully this has served you and made you think a little bit differently about your business. Here's the thing. If you want to learn more about the drivers and the accelerators and like, man, if there's only like more you can go deeper on that. Go to predictablerealestatesuccess.com that's predictablerealestatesuccess.Com and here on the page, if you already know that you want to take another step with us and you want to have a conversation about where you are in your business. There is a button right here on the page. Sort of depends on how you're consuming this. You can request a business Growth strategy session. So either go to predictablerealestatesuccess.com predictablerealestatesuccess.Com or click on the button to schedule a free business growth strategy session where we can dig into your business, where you are now, where you want to go, and what's holding you back to what's possible. You deserve more than you're getting out of your real estate business right now and that doesn't matter regardless of what level you're at in your real estate business growth journey. As long as you want to scale your real estate business and have it not depend on you, we can help you do it. So request a free business growth strategy session or go to predictablerealestatesuccess.com we'll see you over there. Thanks for listening to the Business Freedom Podcast. If you're getting value from the podcast, would you please leave us a five star review and share it with others who might benefit from the content I'm sharing? And if you're ready to scale your real estate business sustainably and profitably, there are a couple options for you. If you're doing under 500,000 in annual GCI, our business foundations Program is for you. Head over to getbusinessfoundations.com that's getbusinessfoundations.com and learn how you can make the shift from over overwhelmed real estate agent to true business owner. If you're doing more than 500,000 in annual Team GCI, there's our graduate program designed for top producers and team leaders who want to grow their team and scale their business. If that's you, go to realestatebschool.com and apply for a free business Growth Strategy session. No matter where you are in your business growth journey, we have the tool, system, strategies, training, training and coaching to get you where you want to be. Remember, only you can create your future. So take action now.